Liberalism understands and presents itself as the moral conscience and force of the modern world: a universal creed of rights, reason and rule of law. This idea retains significant power in our public sphere and is central to the ideological structure of the Daily Maverick, the Democratic Alliance (DA), and so on.
But the liberal order has always depended on rights for some people and in some places, and exclusion and violence for other people. From the genocide in the Americas, to the Atlantic slave trade and colonialism liberal rights for some were undergirded by the destruction, enslavement and unfreedom of others. The same thinkers who wrote of natural rights for some defended the plantation and the colony; the same states that declared the equality and ‘rights of man’ drew their wealth from conquest, genocide and enslavement. The rule of law at home was accompanied by the law of rule in the colonies. As black thinkers like Aimé Césaire and W. E. B. Du Bois understood very well liberal fascism is not an oxymoron.
This has never changed. It was liberal states that pulverised Vietnam and Iraq, organised coups against elected governments from the Congo to Chile and, in 2004, Haiti – the latter enthusiastically supported by the DA and the liberal media here. From the 17th century to today liberalism has been the central ally for the devastation wreaked on much of the world by Europe and its settler colonies.
Liberalism’s sense of its own moral superiority is so strong that it cannot recognise principled opposition on its own terms and often hallucinates the hidden hand of foreign enemies when it is challenged at home – Hamas, Russia, China, Iran. In South Africa we have been told that China is behind independent, rational and principled critique of Western foreign policy, that Iran was behind South Africa’s decision to take Israel to the International Court of Justice. As we have seen with the Daily Maverick, the DA, and people like Frans Cronje and Helen Zille, liberalism literally loses its mind when criticised via the universal application of its stated principles. Its claim to a superior hold on reason implodes when it is asked to apply its basic principles to everyone everywhere.
As people in the West have stood against the genocide in Gaza, a genocide backed at every turn by the liberal states and much liberal opinion in the West, liberalism has repeatedly chosen to abandon its democratic commitments at home rather than permit itself to be held to the standards of a genuinely universal ethic. People affirming that liberal principles should also apply to Palestinians have been beaten, slandered, arrested and blacklisted.
In the United Kingdom people have been arrested on terrorism charges for holding up placards. Now a Swedish academic has been prevented from coming to London for a conference. In 1950 Aimé Césaire wrote of the violence of colonialism returning home: ‘the bourgeoisie is awakened by a terrific boomerang effect’.
Europe’s denial of the humanity of Palestinians, its legitimation of and support for another genocide abroad, is rapidly corroding basic democratic principles at home. Europe cannot enable and defend genocide abroad without compromising democracy at home.